I'm running about 11 full KVMs at once for my infrastructure. The setup has worked great over the past 9 months and I have absolutely zero regrets on my choice of using Proxmox.

However, I've recently done some reading about people having some really bad experiences with the p410i RAID chip. I haven't encountered any issues personally, but although I do keep weekly external backups, these are still not the types of issues that I want to "deal with when we get there."

The idea crossed my mind to completely take the p410i controller out, manually patching in the drive bays, and reinstalling Proxmox under ZFS with RAIDz1 (the RAID5 equivalent).
Is this a good idea? Is there any reason that I should prefer the hardware RAID (even under the risk of total data loss) over a software solution like ZFS? Would I run into memory usage issues, given my stats of 11 KVMs and only 24GB of memory?

To be completely honest, I'm scared. If there is one thing that I always trust to be able to rely on, its my server. Though I've run controlled tests of ZFS under a virtualized Proxmox, you never know how these things can work out in real life, and the last thing I want is to spend days rebuilding my infrastructure (which can still be a pain, even if you have backups) to find out that it's missing a key feature that I used in LVM and that ZFS doesn't support.

.... however
It turns out that my HP Proliant ML350 G6 is not just equipped with the p410i RAID controller... it's integrated with it. The controller is not just a module on the board, it's built into it and I'm unable to uninstall it. I'm also unable to disable it. Looks like HP has got me locked into their hardware this time.
Honestly it's a shame. I got so excited for ZFS, but the only way to interface the drives directly with the OS is to try to RAID0 each individual drive into 5 separate logical volumes (and I've heard that ZFS doesn't like that), which still presents the issue of irrecoverable loss if the controller fails due to the RAID0 metadata. The p410i has no JBOD mode or passthrough either.

Just install another RAID Controller and rewire the cables. Internally, it should use a SFF connection and you should install a card with the same connector type. Probably, you need some extender cables to increase the wire distance.

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